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ART; Beyond Gravity, a Slow-Motion Dance for Art

AS the NASA KC-135 turbojet plunged sharply earthward, Kris Shapiro, a senior at the San Francisco Art Institute, floated weightless near the airplane's ceiling. Her orange ponytail fanned out above her. She and her dance partner, Elizabeth Albee Abascal, a junior, had shed the olive-drab flight suits that NASA required them to wear at takeoff. They bobbed around in sleeveless black unitards that, in Ms. Albee Abascal's case, revealed a tattoo on her right bicep.

The plane soared and dived in a series of parabolic arcs, near the top of which its occupants experienced 25 seconds of weightlessness. As Ms. Shapiro grew accustomed to microgravity, she tried a somersault, then a headstand, plopping down hard on her back when the plane pulled out of its dive and began climbing again.

Soon, however, she and Ms. Albee Abascal got the hang of maneuvering. Pushing off each other, they spun through a series of twists and somersaults -- a graceful yet breakneck dance that would be the envy of the gravity-defying choreographer Elizabeth Streb. But the students were not auditioning for her. Rather, they were performing a scientific experiment as part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program, studying the exchange of angular momentum between partners in zero gravity.

Ms. Shapiro and Ms. Albee Abascal, along with Clovis Blackwell and Frank Pietronigro, fellow students at the San Francisco Art Institute, were the first undergraduates from an art college to be selected by NASA to participate in its two-year-old flight program, which is administered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium. The other 48 teams came from schools known for their science and engineering departments, places like Rice University, Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From the moment they unpacked their equipment, which they had lugged to the Johnson Space Center in Houston in a green-plastic garbage bag, the artists seemed ''from a different culture,'' as Burke Fort, director of the student flight program, put it. Their principal tool was a creativity chamber, a clear plastic tent with Velcro seams and a lavender mesh ceiling in which Ms. Albee Abascal, Mr. Pietronigro and Mr. Blackwell could fling colored water and paint, for experiments that included action painting, ''like Jackson Pollock,'' Mr. Pietronigro explained, ''but eliminating the canvas.''

In the near future, however, Mr. Fort predicted, artists won't be such rare birds at NASA. ''Creativity and creative activities may well be one of the many tools with which astronauts will cope with long-duration flights,'' he explained. ''Mars, for example, is a two-year mission: six months going; one year on the surface, six months coming back. For most mere mortals, that could be quite stressful.''

The art institute team has just completed a videotape documenting their flights, which took place in April. It can be viewed at the Exploratorium science museum here, where the team's science advisers -- Thomas Humphrey and Coral Clark -- are on staff. The tape leaves little doubt about why the KC-135 was nicknamed the ''vomit comet.'' The young women, however, experienced no nausea, a possible consequence, suggested Millard Reshke, head of the space center's vestibular research facility, of their small body mass; both are under 5 feet 5 inches tall.

In his role as scientist, Mr. Blackwell proposed to study ''fluid dynamics,'' observing the behavior of colored water in microgravity. In his capacity as an artist, however, he had other plans. ''I wanted to capture this heavenly thing with all these colored orbs floating around,'' he said. And indeed, his portion of the video, made with a hand-held camera, evokes the sensation of being trapped in a lava lamp.

Mr. Pietronigro, at 43, the team's oldest member, fell prey to crippling motion sickness. When the vents in the creativity chamber failed to provide enough air, Mr. Pietronigro had to rip open the chamber's Velcro seam and gasp for breath. Nor did the multicolored paints that he had squeezed from cake-decorating tubes remain multicolored. They mixed. ''I was down on the floor covered in brown paint,'' he remembered. ''Right before I would float up, I would throw up.''

Although his flight did not go as planned, Mr. Pietronigro expressed no regrets about having spearheaded the team. In 1996, when he learned of the program, he persuaded the art institute's dean of academic affairs to register the school with the California Space Grant Program, a first step in the application process. The next year, after his individual bid was rejected, he built a strong team. Ms. Shapiro, for example, is not only a visual artist -- ''Icarii,'' her series of photographic images on velvet of people falling from the sky were recently exhibited at the art institute -- but a dancer as well. She studied ballet and modern dance from the age of 4, and while still in high school, choreographed for the Pike's Peak Dance Ensemble in her native Colorado.

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Yet the artists' path to Houston was bumpy, even after they were selected for the program. Last winter, when the crew making the film ''Armageddon'' requested use of the KC-135 to film its weightless sequences, NASA refused. In the course of this wrangle, the agency's general counsel learned of the art institute's project and, equating a student videotape with a Hollywood movie, canceled it.

With the help of the team's advisers, particularly Thomas Humphrey, a physicist at the Exploratorium, Ella King Torrey, the president of the San Francisco Art Institute, argued for her students. ''I realized that this program represented the best of the best science students around the country,'' she said. ''We were determined to do everything we could to clarify any misunderstandings and get our students up in the air.''

After sensitive negotiations, NASA let the students attend the two-week training, but reserved judgment on whether they would fly. They scrambled to build their equipment, competing for scarce resources. ''Clearlake, Texas, ran out of Velcro,'' Ms. Shapiro recalled, ''because all the teams were using it.'' Running errands was a struggle; Mr. Pietronigro was the only person old enough to drive their rental car.

SALVATION arrived Sunday night, after a harrowing week, in the form of Coral Clark, a science teacher in residence at the Exploratorium, newly discharged from the hospital after having her tonsils removed. ''I hadn't eaten for four days when I got to Houston,'' Ms. Clark said. ''I was so excited by the opportunity that I didn't clear it with my supervisor. I had to call her from the plane.''

Ms. Clark arrived at 11 P.M. and, as Ms. Shapiro put it, ''took the reins,'' coaching the students for a make-or-break interview on the science content of their projects with Dr. Reshke the next morning. ''Thanks to Ms. Clark,'' Dr. Reshke said, ''they kept sight of the science.'' He let them fly.

''I think he was also interested in us in a guinea pig sort of way,'' Ms. Shapiro observed. Would Ms. Shapiro's and Ms. Albee Abascal's gymnastics, which made motion sickness likely, offset their small mass, which made it improbable?

The flight made a huge impression on the students. ''My dreams have changed,'' Ms. Shapiro said. ''Whenever I fly in dreams, it's much more realistic.'' Her ambitions changed, too; she has applied to NASA's Ames research laboratory for an internship in photography. Ms. Albee Abascal was inspired to study more math this fall, though Mr. Blackwell is perhaps most transformed. He plans to pursue a second undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering.

Mr. Pietronigro, by contrast, may have had a greater impact on NASA than it had on him. ''After the sixth parabola, every time Frank floated up and hit the plane's ceiling, he would get paint on it,'' Ms. Albee Abascal explained. Mr. Pietronigro elaborated: ''It became printmaking. My body was the tool.'' He made these incredible fractal patterns,'' Ms. Clark recalled. ''I should have taken pictures, but we were too embarrassed; we were trying to clean it off.''

NASA, however, left the marks alone. ''There's a wonderful little abstract blob on the ceiling,'' Mr. Fort said. ''It's considered art.' ''

M. G. Lord is working on an informal cultural history of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.